Integrating the conceptual and practice worlds : a case study from Architecture

A compelling challenge for tertiary educators is to respond meaningfully to pressures to provide curricula that translate readily into realworld professional experience. To explore the synergies of an integration of the conceptual and practice worlds, this paper draws on a program, which the author evaluated, that was part of a Committee for University Teaching and Staff Development funded project for students of architecture and construction. The aspect discussed here, Composing Architecture—The Music Room, involved 74 second year students at Deakin University in semester 2, 2001. The case study is used as an illustration of curriculum design, including assessment, to explore how it met the aims of creating learning experiences that were purposeful, rich in their complexity, and mirrored the demands of the profession in a supportive environment that fostered development. One of the major aims was to model professional practice within the academy—in a sense, to enter into a dialogue between the academy and the profession—with the quality of that dialogue being determined by the accuracy or authenticity of the modelling. With this focus, having articulated and discussed the stated educational challenge that this project was intended to meet, the paper tests this against the attributes of authenticity in the environment of education as delineated by Martin-Kniep (2000) and, in so doing, questions some of her claims. Although some theorists (eg, Petraglia, 1998) contend that to prescribe what counts for authenticity is impossible, it is hoped that some insights into linking the academy and the profession will be gained.

Operating a studio within a research culture: the urban heart surgery design research forum

The question of whether or not design can be considered research has perplexed schools of architecture ever since they were first introduced into universities. It was at the center of the Oxbridge union debates in the early 1900s. It formed one of the corner stones of the Oxford conference on education organized by the RIBA in 1958 (Martin 1958) and came under scrutiny again in the UK with the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1992. While the arguments both for and against are considerable1, “in order to understand the questions and the possibilities of architectural research and to respond to the difficulties that confront us now, we have to have a model which acknowledges what schools of architecture really are, and could be, and then work with that” 2.
Drawing on professionally oriented research models, such as qualitative ‘clinical research’, from Medicine and the Health Sciences - where the processes of exploration, observation, investigation, recording and communication are conducted in-situ by the ‘practitioner-as-researcher’ 3 - the following paper outlines an initiative introduced in 1999, referred to as the ‘Urban Heart Surgery’ 4. The program actively integrates students entering their second degree program into a studio based design research culture and allows them to engage in critical discourse by working on high profile strategic design projects in three areas significant to Victoria’s future growth: Metropolitan Urbanism, Urbanism on the Periphery, and Regional Urbanism.
With a growing core of industrial and community based partnerships, including: four regional councils (Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Warrnambool) and three metropolitan municipalities (Melbourne City, Port Phillip and Wyndham), the forum actively facilitates a graduate/practice research agenda through the ARC linkage grant program.

Beyond the gap: great liberation through architectural design teaching in the bardo?

Tibetan Buddhists articulate the bardo as the gap that exists between one fundamental stage of existence and another. Its most common usage is to describe the interval between death and reincarnation, but more literally, bar means 'in-between' and do 'island' or 'mark'. The 'bardo experience' is thus any one in which the 'past situation has just occurred and the future situation has not yet manifested itself. Instruction in architectural design attempts to provide guidance in the process of guiding students across the bardo from intention, analysis, and theorisation, to the creation of architectural representations and products. As such the architectural academy operates within a history of methods and codifications which try to quantify and bring a level of certainty to this process.
Recently however, there has been a questioning of traditionally accepted ways of ‘knowing’ the world, which has manifested in challenges to received ‘truths’ and increasing interest in other, previously marginalised histories and knowledges. The critiques that flow from this questioning contend that objective cultural ‘truths’ are simply the discursive result of the dominance of particular ways of perceiving the world. The practice of architecture has not been immune from this. The field has become a subject, for instance, of sociological, feminist and postcolonial critiques. However, their bearing on the pedagogy of composing architecture remains fragmentary and contested. My interest in this subject is derived from a desire to use the opportunities presented by contemporary cultural shifts to develop design-based architectural research that will assist future architects to operate in the uncertainties of an irreducibly plural global community. This paper will explore some ways in which academic research might bear upon the design studio’s negotiation of architectural bardos.

Environmental design : incorporating a rating tool into the design of commercial buildings

Environmental performance assessment or green building rating tools for commercial buildings are one of the more recent responses to encourage green solutions for commercial buildings. This paper discusses the initial stages of a research project that looks at the impact of a rating tool, such as Green Star, on design. There are numerous ways in which an architect can design commercial buildings, but environmental design solutions have consistently failed to become accepted practice. Therefore, how will this tool be incorporated into the building design process? Developed to assist the designer can the inclusion of a rating tool such as Green Star provide an effective framework to encourage the inclusion of environmental design strategies in commercial buildings? A field study, recording the design process of a commercial building, anticipates that a whole building assessment approach towards design, as proposed through the Green Star Rating Tool, will provide an effective framework to set and monitor design targets in order to optimise the environmental design goals in commercial buildings.

Pathways to health through Australian woodlands and forests: `Sign-posts` from recent research and practice

Health is inherently 'ecological' and the natural environment plays a crucial role in human health and well-being. Yet we do not necessarily design, manage or market such areas in ways that acknowledge this link. This paper draws on recent research by a Deakin University team exploring the links between use of and involvement in the maintenance of forests/woodlands, and health and well-being outcomes. Qualitative and quantitative methods have been used to collect data from forest/woodland users and tram volunteers contributing to management and maintenance of such areas, concerning their perceptions of the impacts of the experience
on their health and well-being. In two of the projects, samples of 'users' and 'volunteers' were compared with samples 'non-users' and 'non-volunteers'. Several of the studies included the use of scales of self-rated health, social cohesion, and frequency of use of medical services.The studies have identified a range of perceived physical, mental and social health benefits resulting from use of and/or engagement with forests/woodlands. Study findings have implications for design, management and marketing of such areas, since they identity factors influencing use of and engagement with such areas, and have the potential to promote more widespread recognition of the value of such areas and more commitment to them by individuals, communities and governments. The challenge for us is to build on this research base to more clearly Signpost the mutually beneficial links between forest and woodland ecosystems and human health and well-being, creating new and better pathways to a healthy future.

Defuturing an architecture of destruction: a reconciliation of Van Berkel and Bos to the new design philosophy of Tony Fry

For some time now Tony Fry has promoted the idea of 'The Sustainment', an idea that asserts a paradigm shift in attitudes to consumption. 'The Sustainment' recognises that increasingly human futures are products of self-determination and not chance. Fry’s hypothesis can be understood through his concept of Defuturing, a philosophy that questions the role of design and the responsibility of designers to facilitating the ability to sustain (Fry 1999).
Central to Fry’s philosophy is an awareness that it is in the best interests of designers and their clients, as inhabitants of cultures increasingly driven by technology, to be aware of the relationships between the products and theories of design and the processes and implications of technological change. This is an awareness that is central to the concepts, work, and methodologies of the ‘UN Studio’ of Van Berkel and Bos described and elaborated upon in Move – Imagination, Techniques, and Effects (Van Berkel & Bos 1999). Here, Ben Van Berkel defines the parameters and methodologies employed by UN Studio in an environment of technological and socio-economic change. The Dutch practice could be said to exemplify something of a zeitgeist in current architectural design that sees architects, as Van Berkel and Bos view them, as “fashion designers of the future, dressing events to come and holding up a mirror to the world (Van Berkel & Bos 1999, back cover).” It is a zeitgeist that Fry might see as aligned to the resilient hype of ‘new creativity’, ‘globalisation’ the ‘romance with technology’, and the vacuous-ness of the world of fashion. (Fry The Voice of Sustainment: on Design Intelligence 2005).
A source of breaking down such design propaganda is identified by Fry in the notion of ‘scenarios,’ which “provide a mechanism for politico-practice assemblage in which dialogues and narratives of change can be rehearsed in ways that enable participants to re-educate themselves via critical confrontations” (Fry The Voice of Sustainment: on Design Intelligence 2005). From such a perspective this paper aims to practically illustrate and ground the Defuturing of Fry by establishing a dialogue between his writings and the theories that have generated the architectural designs of Van Berkel and Bos and there UN Studio. This will be a ‘scenario’ that examines therefore an appropriation and transformation of the applied intellectual practice of Van Berkel and Bos. Through this confrontation we shall explore the question of why sustainability appears to be so low in the agenda of many pre-eminent contemporary architects, and how we might refocus therefore practice and theory on the ability to sustain.

Sustainable design education: teaching, learning and assessment in collaborative group design projects

Changes in the funding of tertiary education resulting in less one-to-one staff/student contact time mean that we cannot continue to teach as we have historically been taught. If design schools are unable to implement strategies that successfully overcome resource intensive studio teaching programs, then current architectural education may for many higher education providers be based on an unsustainable course structure. Rather than spreading their time thinly over a large number of individual projects, an increasing number of lecturers are setting group projects. This allows them to co-ordinate longer and more in-depth review sessions on a smaller number of assignments. However, while the group model may reflect the realities of the design process in practice, the approach is not without short comings as a teaching archetype for the assessment of individual skill competencies. Hence, what is clear is the need for a readily adoptable andragogy for the teaching and assessment of group design projects.
The following describes the background, methodology and early results of a Strategic Teaching and Learning Grant currently running at the School of Architecture and Building at Deakin University. The project is evaluating two design programs at Deakin and it is envisaged that the results of the
investigation may inform other project-based teaching disciplines experiencing a similar need for new knowledge and skill-based delivery due to increasing staff-student ratios.

Monitoring ecological impacts: concepts and practice in flowing waters

Monitoring Ecological Impacts provides the tools needed to design  assessment programs that can reliably monitor, detect and allow  management of human impacts on the natural environment. The procedures described are well-grounded in inferential logic. Step-by-step guidelines and flow diagrams provide clear and useable protocols, which are applicable to real situations.

Workforce trends in specialist and GP obstetric practice in Victoria

OBJECTIVE: To provide a contemporary picture of the general practitioner and specialist obstetric workforce in Victoria.

DESIGN, PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Postal census by questionnaire of all 317 Fellows and 961 Diplomates on the Victorian database of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in September 2003.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Sex, age and geographical distributions and patterns of retirement from and recruitment to the GP and specialist obstetric workforce in Victoria.

RESULTS: 244 Fellows (77.0%) and 652 Diplomates (67.8%) participated. The average age of Diplomates was 42 years; only 20% were involved in procedural obstetrics. Of GPs practising procedural obstetrics, 56% intended to cease within 7 years. Two-thirds of specialist obstetricians continued to practise obstetrics. Among those ceasing obstetrics, almost half had done so since 2000. Among Fellows ceasing obstetric practice, there is a peak in the 50-60-years age group, but cessation of obstetric practice occurred across all age groups.

CONCLUSION: The proportion of GPs involved in procedural obstetrics has fallen markedly over the past decade, with half of those ceasing practice in the 40-50-years age group. New GPs entering the workforce with the Diploma and overseas doctors are unlikely to meet the procedural workforce shortfall. Attracting the large cohort of doctors aged 40-50 years back to obstetric practice must be a priority. Given the pattern of retirements from obstetrics, there will be insufficient numbers of specialists to maintain current levels of service. The reasons include non-participation in obstetrics by new graduates and international medical graduates, the inadequate number of new graduates, and the predominance of women among specialists aged under 40 years, whose work output tends to be affected by family commitments.

Literacy in the new media age: creativity as multimodal design

Much of the current discourse of adolescence is best described as emblematic of modernity, as colonial, as gendered, and as administrative (Lesko, 2001) working to maintain “progressive” school literacy practices that ignore adolescents’ new “cyber-techno subjectivity” (Luke & Luke, 2001) and creativity in the “new media age” (Kress, 2003). School curricula often do not acknowledge the range of skills adolescents acquire outside formal education. Youths’ new multimodal social and cultural practices—as they fashion themselves creatively in multiple modes as different kinds of people in “New Times” (Luke, 1998)— oints to the liberating power of new technologies that embrace their imagination and creativity. In two middle years classes, adolescents’ creativity was recognised and validated when they were encouraged to re-represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design (New London Group, 1996). The results suggest the changed classroom habitus (Bourdieu, 1980) produced new and emergent discursive and material practices where creativity, through imaginative collaboration, emerges as capital in an economy of practice (Bourdieu, 1996). The findings suggest schools should recognize adolescents’ creativity—that often manifests itself through their cultural and social capital resources—as they integrate and adapt to the new affordances acquired through their out-of-school literacy practices.

Disrupting girls in virtual communities of practice: discursive performativity as agency

In line with the work of feminists ‘post-linguists’ (Threadgold, 1997; Poynton, 1989; Lee, 1994) who seek to produce readings of texts which indicate the ways individuals are positioned to take up positions within discourses and thus come to constitute themselves as subjects of those discourses, this paper reports on how adolescent girls’ hypermedia design works to alter the conceptual repertoire of the individual and in doing so alters the individual’s subjectivity. By examining girls hypermedia design that challenges/resists male domination, I discuss their acts of uploading and hypermedia design in terms of Butler’s theorization of discursive performativity. I believe the adolescent girls employ a form of “linguistic agency” or “discursive agency” (Butler, 1997) that allows them to make use of a wide range of discursive practices that are nonlinguistic or not entirely linguistic. Because the girls were involved in a set of relationships over time, both inside and outside of school in both virtual and real time, within their communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), they engage with particular areas of curricular knowledge—differently than boys—by showcasing their re-representations online. Consequently, this presents the possibility they may possess a joint enterprise and similar sense of identity. This paper puts forth the idea that within virtual communities of practice, new contexts emerge when disrupting girls/women can work in transgressive modes.

How practice size impacts on the implementation and dissemination of post occupancy evaluation

There has been much research on the subject of environmentally sustainable design (ESD), with emerging techniques and technologies improving rapidly and informing sustainability higher education teaching to architects and prospective architects. By examining the success of sustainable designs using post occupancy evaluations, architectural practices might also increase their knowledge of sustainable building practice. Post occupancy evaluations could be useful for improving the designs of future buildings and the design processes that generated them. This paper aims to evaluate these claims by asking: "Do sustainable design practices use the feedback gained from post occupancy evaluations?," "How does the feedback refine the design process?," "How is the information gained in these evaluations absorbed within the firm's design practices?," and, "Does the size of a practice impact on its implementation and
dissemination of POE?" This paper investigates the questions posed above through the questioning of architectural practices that have gained a reputation for environmentally sustainable design by having a strong sustainable design philosophy and/or by being recognised for this by winning a sustainability design award. The interviewed practices will have provided some form of post occupancy evaluation as a service or employed them to add to their own knowledge.

2001 Volvo Award winner in clinical studies : effects of a media campaign on back pain beliefs and its potential influence on management of low back pain in general practice

Study Design. Quasi-experimental, nonrandomized, nonequivalent, parallel group-controlled study involving before and after telephone surveys of the general population and postal surveys of general practitioners was conducted, with an adjacent state used as a control group.


Objectives. To evaluate the effectiveness of a population-based intervention designed to alter beliefs about back pain, influence medical management, and reduce disability and workers’ compensation–related costs.


Summary of Background Data. A multimedia campaign begun during 1997 in Victoria, Australia, positively advised patients with back pain to stay active and exercise, not to rest for prolonged periods, and to remain at work.


Methods. The campaign’s impact on population beliefs about back pain and fear-avoidance beliefs was measured in telephone surveys, and the effect of the campaign on the potential management of low back pain by general practitioners was assessed by eliciting their likely approach to two hypothetical scenarios in mailed surveys. Demographically identical population groups in Victoria and the control state, New South Wales, were surveyed at three times: before, during, and after intervention in Victoria.


Results. The studies were completed by 4730 individuals in the general population and 2556 general practitioners. There were large statistically significant improvements in back pain beliefs over time in Victoria (mean scores on the Back Beliefs Questionnaire, 26.5, 28.4, and 29.7), but not in New South Wales (26.3, 26.2, and 26.3, respectively). Among those who reported back pain during the previous year, fear-avoidance beliefs about physical activity improved significantly in Victoria (mean scores on the Fear-Avoidance Beliefs Questionnaire for physical activity, 14, 12.5, and 11.6), but not in New South Wales (13.3, 13.6, and 12.7, respectively). General practitioners in Victoria reported significant improvements over time in beliefs about back pain management, as compared with their interstate colleagues. There were statistically significant interactions between state and time for 7 of 10 responses on management of acute low back pain, and for 6 of 10 responses on management of subacute low back pain.


Conclusion. A population-based strategy of providing positive messages about back pain improves the beliefs of the general population and general practitioners about back pain and appears to influence medical management.

Reflections on teaching and learning online: quality program design, delivery and support issues from a cross-global perspective

This reflective paper began with a discussion of the online program design and delivery experiences of three senior faculty members at the University of Calgary (Canada) and Deakin University (Australia), which was recorded at Deakin University. After drawing on this recording in their research and practice, one faculty member from each institution decided to review and expanded upon their intervening experiences in terms of issues of quality program design, delivery, and support issues when teaching, and learning in different cultural contexts. The authors discovered that these issues are as important today as they were when they met to record the interview, and have concluded their discussion here with thoughts about the teaching, student, and administrative supports that institutions engaged in online program delivery cross-culturally must address in order to successfully deliver quality online programs worldwide.

Continuous improvement through shared understanding : reconceptualising instructional design for online learning

Many Australian tertiary institutions provide support for academic staff in the design and development of online teaching and learning resources, often employing a centralised unit staffed with educational and instructional designers, multimedia and online developers, audio/video producers and graphic artists. It is not unusual for these units to have evolved from print-based distance education providers and consequently the design and development processes inherent within those units are often steeped in ‘traditional’ sequential instructional development models. We argue that these models are no longer valid for effectively working with academic staff given the dynamic nature of online learning environments and the diversity of skills to implement effective online learning. This paper therefore presents an extended instructional design model in which the development cycle for online teaching and learning materials uses a scaffolding strategy in order to cater for learner-centred activities and to maximise scarce developer and academic resources. The model also integrates accepted phases of the instructional development process to provide guidelines for the disposition of staff and to more accurately reflect the creation of resources as learning design rather than instructional design. It is a model that builds on instructional design processes and integrates concepts of team-based development, shared understanding and the development of relevant communities of practice.